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Your Instagram page or profile is not a business. But, here’s what you can do about that…

Okay, so in this video, I wanna basically explain to you why your Instagram page or profile is not an actual business. It’s simply a marketing medium. A way to get in front of your audience.

The thing about having an Instagram page is you can accumulate a lot of fans, a lot of followers relatively quickly if you’re providing relevant value to them. Pictures that they’re interested in, posts that they can like, things that they can interact with. The thing is you will never officially own your Instagram page.

If at any time, Instagram changes their terms of service, they can wipe out your entire business really quickly and one of the easiest ways to save yourself from this happening is to get people from Instagram, so you are going to use the platform, but you need to get people off of Instagram and onto your email list. Because you can own your email list.

And people might say that email lists are dying or email is dead or all of that, but the thing about it is email is always a medium that people are gonna be using and it’s just because it’s easier. It’s something that everyone has. Everyone has an email address.

So, by taking someone from Instagram, from the platform, from the marketing medium and bringing them over to something you own … so, you’ll want to get people onto an email list and then, ultimately, you’ll wanna host a lot of content on your particular website. Your blog, your whatever that happens to be for you. (As you can tell, this article is hosted on my own personal website)

And the reason for this is because on your blog, you can control everything. You can control the layouts of things, you can control where pictures are, where videos are, where people are looking, where they’re directing their eye contact, all of that.

On Instagram, you can’t have control over this. Someone can go to your page and will be scrolling and they’ll just be seeing pictures, they’ll be seeing all of that, but the thing is you can’t build a business out of that. You can direct traffic from that and traffic is just people, just eyeballs, just individual people seeing your content and consuming it.

So, the next time that you think that you’ve got 100,000 Instagram followers and you think that life is good, it’s perfect, everything’s gonna be like this forever, just think that Instagram could delete your profile.

They could just delete all of the hard work that you put into it because you might have done something against their terms, you might have posted something that’s controversial.

What do you do about that?

Well, the simplest thing is to get people to other social platforms. Like get people on your Facebook page, get people in your Facebook group, get people on YouTube (Chris Hughes YouTube).

Like right now, you’re watching this, most likely, on YouTube and if you are on YouTube, click that little subscribe button down below and turn on the bell for notifications so you can get first notice of new videos.

Every single time, I’m building up communities in Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter. And all of those direct back to my WhosChrisHughes.comwebsitee because I own that and that website gets people onto my email list.

So, there’s multiple points of contact that I’m having with people who are going to be consuming my content. And keeping that in mind, every time that … if you’re building up Instagram pages just for traffic, that’s awesome, but make sure that you’re capturing the information.

I made a big mistake a couple of years ago with … I have a lot of Facebook fans, fan pages, over 9,000,000 right now and what happened is a lot of those things, I wasn’t directing everyone to landing pages or sales funnels where I could capture their email address.

I was just sending people to different affiliate offers, different sales products and things. And what happens is when Facebook changed their algorithm, posting one picture used to get 7 to 10% of the fan base seen. Now, it’s less than 1% or something.

The same thing is gonna happen with Instagram. It’s just how they switch the network’s function like outside shareholders come in and they try to share their viewpoints on stuff. It basically destroys the user experience. But, we’re users, we’re just content creators for these people. We’re not shareholders of the company, we’re not the owners of the company, so we really don’t have a say.

Which is why you need to focus on getting people from your social properties from your Instagram page over to other things and if you see my Instagram, a lot of the times, I’ll change what my link is.

I’ll put people to my YouTube channel or I’ll put people to a free ebook or a free members area where I give them more training and tutorials and things.

And each of these is just another point of contact for the potential fans, for the WhosChrisHughes Brand.

So, keep that in mind. If you haven’t done this yet or if this is kind of blowing your mind, like you might be overwhelmed, I’m actually gonna include a link down below to a free members area where you can get detailed videos on how to create these types of things. How to create a landing page that you can capture people’s email information, just stuff that’s gonna be useful for you if you’re planning on actually creating a business out of your Instagram profile.

So, that’s gonna help you if you take action on it. You’re gonna have to watch the videos and do the stuff that I teach, but that’s how everything is. You have to do the thing in order to get the result.

But, thank you so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to my channel for more information, more tutorials just like this, sometimes just rant about stuff and click that little bell notification icon so you can get a first notification.

This article is a ClickFunnels Review – one that will address a lot of common questions you might have about how it works, and if it can work for your business.

To be upfront and honest here, I am a user of ClickFunnels and have affiliate links to the product itself within this article. However I do not believe ClickFunnels is appropriate for every business. Read the full article to make up your own decisions on the service and if it is for you, you can use my link and I’ll get a little bit of money as thanks. If you don’t choose to use it, no harsh feelings. It isn’t for everyone.

What is ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels is an online sales funnel builder in its simplest form. It helps business owners like yourself market, sell and deliver your products online. This tool really simplifies the entire process of creating sales funnels and makes it quite easy. In fact, the majority of the time you will just be using templates that ClickFunnels gives you. These templates can be downloaded into your account and you can begin using them in around 15-20 seconds.

Many funnels are basically like a “business in a box” where once you download the funnel, you simply have to log in and just edit the content that is on the page. They make it very simple with a lot of “drag and drop” functionality and it’s really easy for you to click on something and edit.

Traditional sales funnels used to take months to build up. You would need to buy domain names, set up website hosting, create the landing pages from scratch, incorporate auto-responders and hope and pray that you didn’t mess anything up. Each of those used to be another additional monthly cost for your business.

(Most of the time I messed stuff up)

With ClickFunnels, it’s all under one roof. So it keeps it super simple to manage it all from only one section. I’ll get into the different price points later on as well.

Overview of ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels Benefits

The reason that ClickFunnels has been so successful is that they really have focused on the essentials. Instead of requiring the users to master crazy tech stuff, they made everything templated out. For me personally, I love that fact because I’m TERRIBLE with tech stuff. I actually have a tech guy on my team who handles all the stuff that’s not within the ClickFunnels realm.

ClickFunnels has sales funnels for all types of things. Funnels for webinars, sales, lead generation, membership sites and everything in between. You can actually see if your business has a funnel already pre-built for it by clicking here.

They keep coming out with new funnels and the community that has been built up around ClickFunnels is incredibly impressive.

With ClickFunnels, you really just need to choose which type of funnel fits your business best. For example, if you are selling a subscription your sales funnel will look different than if you are selling just an eCommerce product. Each of those is unique and the good news is that ClickFunnels has funnels for both of these types of businesses.

Let’s say you are running a business that you want to be able to have an automated webinar selling your product, and a back-end subscription product. The first thing you will do is select the type of funnel you’re going to be building. If you don’t know what type of funnel you should be using, I recommend reading the book, The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook.

Once you have selected the type of funnel you are going to be building, you need to select a template. Lucky for us, ClickFunnels has a variety of sample templates we can use, templates that have been tested to convert. When you have these templates (and the A/B split testing setting inside ClickFunnels) you really have an advantage over someone who is running traffic to only one page.

If you’ve ever seen an option on a site that you like, you can most likely do it on ClickFunnels. Things like adding an animation, adding a countdown clock, adding videos or images, all of this is relatively easy to add. There’s tutorials for almost everything as well, so when you have questions there are simple to follow videos that make learning easy.

ClickFunnels Pros

The good news is that ClickFunnels does what it’s supposed to. It simplifies the process of getting a sales funnel up and running, thus making you sales.

The biggest benefit of ClickFunnels is that you don’t need to spend years learning how to code in order to get your sales funnel live. You will be pleasantly surprised by how simple they made everything, and how it’s all in one place. I personally have the Enterprise version of ClickFunnels ($297/mo) because it opens up a lot of extra stuff as you have seen in the pricing sheet above.

ClickFunnels really simplifies everything with building a business online. Instead of having to log in to a bunch of different services in order for something to work, it’s all done behind one login. That alone saves hours of time with trying to remember passwords and pay for other monthly services. It follows the KISS idea (Keep It Stupid Simple) and I like that.

ClickFunnels makes you money. Wait, what? Yeah! They make it easy for you to know the numbers so that you can profitably use paid traffic. I’ll show you an example…

Let’s review this quick just to show you how this works. The first thing you’ll notice is that up at the top of the picture it shows “Earnings Per Click $1.14” and “Gross is $253.75” and “Average Cart Value is $50.75”

Let’s review this for those of you who aren’t familiar with these terms.

Earnings per click are simply how much money is made everytime someone “clicks” on the link to enter this funnel. You can look at a click as just a human user who is interested in your product/service and they come upon your sales funnel.

One simple formula to know whether or not your business will be profitable is to know this number, Earnings Per Click (or EPC) and know your Cost Per Click (or CPC).

Then it’s simple math. If you are paying $1 CPC and you are making $1.14 EPC you can see that everytime someone clicks your link, you’ll profit $0.14

$1.14 EPC – $1 CPC = $0.40 profit

I know that doesn’t seem like a lot right now, but think about what happens when you improve these numbers. The first thing you can change is your CPC. So if you are only paying $0.50 CPC look at the numbers. $1.14 EPC – $0.50 CPC = $0.64 Profit

What would that look like if you were to spend $1,000 on buying clicks?

$1,000 x $0.50 CPC = 500 clicks

if you are making $0.64 profit every time someone clicks, that’s $320 profit. Here’s how that’s done: $0.64 profit per click x 500 clicks = $320

So right there, you are spending $1,000 and getting a PROFIT of $320 on that money you spend. 32% ROI. That’s pretty impressive, right? The good news is that with ClickFunnels, you can know these numbers and then its simply buying qualified traffic (clicks) for less than you make from your EPC.

You can also do things like add upsells, down-sells, cross-sells and your email auto-responder can make sales for you down the road. I’m not going to get into all of that right now. If you want to talk about that you’ll need to hire me for consulting at the Hire Chris Hughes page on my blog here. Hint: it’s up at the top of the page.

The next thing shared is the “Gross” which is simply how many sales were made, so gross revenue.

After that is the Average Cart Value, which for this funnel was $50.75. This simply shows you what an average customer was worth in this particular sales funnel.

The drag-and-drop functionality is really nice.

Instead of having to learn all the tech that comes with editing a website, you simply can drag-and-drop different elements to make the page look like you want it to. That’s a huge time saver. It’s also really easy to save a page and use it again. That means if you created a particular landing page or offer page or something, you can simply save the template and re-use it in a different.

A/B Testing is very simple to do with ClickFunnels. You simply create a duplicate page and make changes to it and then drag a little bar to determine how much traffic to send to each of the pages. Super simple. If you aren’t split testing, you need to be split testing EVERYTHING. You could change your business dramatically if you simply take your opt-in page from 10% to 30% opt-in rate.

ClickFunnels Cons

Even though ClickFunnels is a product I use, pretty much daily, they still have cons. As with everything, it is whether or not the pros outweight the cons in your particular business.

Some people think it is overpriced. You get either the $97 a month option or the $297 a month option. If you are new in business, that is a fairly pricely number to have hanging over your head every month. While I personally don’t view $100 or $300 a month as being overpriced for what the service is, other people do.

My viewpoint on that is to simply use the tool to create an extra $100 or $300 a month recurring revenue in your business. That way the tool pays for itself.

Customer service isn’t the best. I’ve had a lot of great responses from the ClickFunnels support lately, but in the past it was a weak point. This is understandable from my viewpoint though because of how quickly the company has been growing. I understand that with some tech stuff, it takes a while to get back to me with solutions. Some other people simply get super angry really quickly and when something isnt’ resolved immediately they go on to bash everything.

If you’re okay with someone not immediately getting back to you on something, this is fine. The support usually gets back to me within 2-3 hours now. If you’re someone who needs immediate gratification on everything in your life, you’re delusional in my eyes and I don’t think ClickFunnels is for you and I also know for a fact that you and I shouldn’t personally work together.

ClickFunnels is heavily reliant on Russell Brunson still. It appears that the team he is building is coming together nicely in order for him to properly make an exit from the company if and when he decides to. In the beginning, it was 100% reliant on him delivering all the content, but lately, they have some other people (successful students) stepping in and teaching. I think that’s a wise move on the companies part.

The ClickFunnels community is very “cult-like” which is what they have created. They want people who absolutely LOVE their content, their service and everything about it. I think that is wonderful because it keeps people coming back for more. I look at it as the same type of “cult” that Apple has created. The ultimate fan-boys and fan-girls.

The Facebook group for ClickFunnels has over 100,000 people in it right now and there’s people constantly posting in there. The good news is that a lot of people are sharing valuable tips and tricks to help you grow your business. The bad news is that a lot of people post in there for the intention of bragging about their success and then trying to sell you into their course.

Just be aware, that everyone wants you to buy something. Hell, you’re reading this right now and I’m going to recommend ClickFunnels to you but I at least want to offer you enough info to make your own mind up about it. It might not be right for your business, and if that’s the case no worries. You shouldn’t buy something or use something because everyone else is doing it.

There is a TON of different products for sale through ClickFunnels. I’ve invested in a majority of them and they do help make my business easier. The 2 free books, DotComSecrets and Expert Secrets are both incredible. They really did a great job explaining how funnels work and how you can leverage them to build your business. Even if you don’t use the tool, those books are valuable and worth the money. They do free + shipping options for both books, and the book costs $7.95 to ship to ya.

There will be outages with the software.

This is inevitable with any and every business. My personal website isn’t online 100% of the time either, I have been testing and tweaking things for years and it still goes down from time to time.

But with ClickFunnels, it’s going to be down at times. That’s simply how to world is and I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it.

So should you get ClickFunnels?

Honestly, that’s up to you. If you need to re-read this article then please do. Review other options if you feel it necessary and make up your own mind. This is your life, your business and your money.

Haha, that might not be what you were expecting after reading this. A lot of articles just try to sell you on the service. Just to be transparent, I will make a commission if you choose to sign up for ClickFunnels with my link, but either way, at least you now have a better understanding of the service.

If you do use my link to sign up for ClickFunnels I can add you to my Facebook group and do a quick call (15 mins) with you to help you get started. You know, like basic stuff to see just how you can use it. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to promise this either because who knows what could happen.

If you have any other questions let me know in the comments down below and I can add some more stuff into the article here.

Thanks for reading,
Chris Hughes

PS – here’s the link again to sign up for the 14 day trial of ClickFunnels if you want it >> Click Here

How to Get More Instagram Followers

Getting more followers on your Instagram account starts with a combination of choosing the right content and the right hashtags to target.

Finding the right hashtags can be a make or break situation for your account. For example, if you’re looking to build up an account in the “Entrepreneur” space, it’s going to be crazy competitive.

If you choose to target keywords such as #Entrepreneuer right off the bat you are going to be competing with over 33 MILLION results for that particular keyword. What that basically means is that you’ll need to have a few thousand likes and comments in order to show up on the top 9 posts for that keyword.

That’s extremely difficult for a beginning account with less than 10,000 followers.

So what can you do instead?

Well, this is the hard part. you’re going to need to play around with a lot of different keywords and hashtags to find the hashtags that have less competition.

For instance, the keyword #entrepreneurquote only has 60,000 results with the average top 9 posts getting around 200 likes and 50 comments.

That’s much easier to get on the top 9 posts for than a hashtag that has thousands of likes and comments.

Does that make sense?

If so, the tool Social Info is terrific for helping you with identifying top keywords/hashtags to target in your campaigns.

Go ahead and read that again if the size of that didn’t sink in the first time. When I first read those, I re-read that like 4 times. 74% of ALL online traffic and over 5 BILLION videos are watched every day.

This brings us to the next part. You know that YouTube is an important content tool for your business, and you’re ready to start leveraging videos to grow your own business.

In this article, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about creating a YouTube channel, so you can start uploading your own videos and growing your audience today.

How to Create a YouTube Channel

1. Create a Google account (if you don’t already have one).

If You Don’t Already Have a Google Account

Go to youtube.com and click “sign in” in the upper right-hand corner. From there, you’ll be taken to a Google sign-in page. Click “more options”:

Once you click ‘Create Account’ you’ll just follow a few steps to create a Google account.

If You Already Have a Google Account

All you’ve gotta do is head to YouTube.com and click “sign in” on the upper right-hand corner. From there, you’ll get redirected to the same page as shown above, but you’ll get to select which Google account you want to sign in with.

At this stage, you want to make sure you are selecting the right account you want to be associated with your YouTube channel.

2. Optimize your YouTube Channel with brand details.

Once you’re all logged into your account, it’s time for you to go to the top right and click your picture (the one with the circle). This is known as your user icon. You’ll see a drop-down menu open up and then you need to click on “settings.”

From there, you’ll be taken to your account overview. Under “additional features,” click “create a new channel.”

The first account you’ll want to create is your Brand Account. It can honestly be whatever you want to name it, it doesn’t have to be the same name that you used to create your Google account. I do recommend thinking about your brand name prior to creating the channel.

For example, have a channel named “Gaming With Chris” would be much easier to remember for your future fans than something like “ChrisGames11892873Life” so keep that in mind when naming your channel.

After clicking “Create” you might be asked to verify the account. This is done via text or voice call. Alll you’ve gotta do is enter the code you receive if this happens.

Once your account has been verified, congratulations! It’s time to start with customizing your YouTube channel.

3. Customize Your YouTube Channel.

There are a few key elements that you want to customize on your new YouTube channel:
1) Descriptions
2) Visuals

Descriptive Details

From your channel dashboard, click “customize channel.”

We will just do the fundamentals right now. After you click on the “customize channel” option, you’ll get taken to your basic channel. That’s where you’ll see the cogwheel over on the right side…

You’ll get this pop-up, where you should click “Advanced settings.”

Finally, we get to start entering some basic info about our new channel. We’ll start off with the country you’re based, and make sure that we add a few keywords that describe what our channel will be about.

This is also where we select whether or not we want it to appear as a recommended channel on other account pages. I always select yes for that.

It’s also within these settings that you can link an AdWords account, add a Google Analytics property tracking ID and make advertising selections.

This is where you’ll want to fill out your channel description (which I recommend optimizing so it’s easier for people to discover your channel). You can also add contact info and links to both your website and other social media channels. You can have up to five links here.

Your YouTube Channel Art

Your channel art is basically like your “YouTube home base” so you want it to accurately reflect that. Google has a ton of resources for content owners, everything from images to use, to image editing tools.

One big tip is to make sure you create a responsive banner that matches dimensions for various user experiences, like desktop, mobile, or TV.

Google has put together this handy image so we know the dimensions to use… (or you can hire someone to do it for you)

Be sure to upload your profile photo as well. If your channel is linked to a Brand Account, as we showed you above. After that, you’ll have to update the image that’s in your “about me” section on your Google account as well.

When you click “change” under your profile icon, you might see this message:

If you see this, click on “Edit” and then you’ll be able to edit your Brand Account info. This is where you’ll be able to change your profile photo, the same one displayed on your YouTube channel.

The recommended image size for this is 800 x 800 pixels.

Next up, you’ll want to add your channel art, which is basically just a banner image.

How to Add Videos and Optimizing Them For YouTube Search Traffic

Since you’ve optimized your channel to make it easier to discover, that is still just the beginning.

Once you begin adding videos to your channel, you’ll want to make sure that you follow these simple tips to improve your chances of being discovered. Remember that YouTube is a search based network, so a lot of the content that you create should be based around answering questions that people have within your niche.

A little cheat here for finding what people are searching for within your niche is to use the tool Answer The Public to find common questions that people are already asking. This is a great way for you to shortcut your path to success on YouTube.

Here’s a perfect example of me using that exact tool while I was creating this article. I typed in the question “How to Create a YouTube Channel” and this is the result it gave me.

Now that might seem a little intimidating at this stage. There’s a ton of different searches that people are doing just for “How to Create a YouTube Channel”.

Here are just a few of the questions that I could create YouTube videos around:
– How to Create a Channel In YouTube
– How to Create A YouTube Channel for Business
– How to Create a YouTube channel for My Business

What you can do is take 1 video and record a video answering that exact question. Repeat that for the next 30 days and you’ll have 30 pieces of content that help solve people’s problems and bring you more visitors to both your channel and your sales funnels.

Let’s talk about the key aspects of your video

Title – The title is the first thing that people will read when they are browsing the search results. You want to include the target keyword in the title, along with having the title pique the interest of the viewer.

Image – The thumbnail image that you use should be relevant, and most of all pique someone’s curiosity so that they will click through to learn more.

Description – Yourdescription should be an extension of the video. While people come to YouTube to watch video content, the search engine will read this information so you want to make sure that what is written in the description is useful to the reader. I recommend linking up to a few different videos that are on your channel for people to learn more. You can learn more about this in the Video Ranking Club Course.

Tags – Tags are a simple way for your viewers and for YouTube to understand what your content is going to be about. Use relevant tags though, it’s not worth it to try to game the system. Google may actually penalize you for using tags that aren’t relevant.

Category – YouTube’s Creator Academy suggests that marketers “think about what is working well for each category” you’re considering by answering questions like:

Who are the top creators within the category? What are they known for, and what do they do well?

Are there any patterns between the audiences of similar channels within a given category?

Do the videos within a similar category have share qualities like production value, length, or format?

So that’s it! Now it’s time to start creating YouTube content that helps solves problems for people within your niche!

Ever wonder how some people create incredible graphics for their YouTube videos?

Well, the secret to creating custom YouTube thumbnails is using a little known tool, by the name of Canva. Watch this video below to learn how you can start creating custom thumbnails in the next 5 minutes (or less)

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DISCLAIMER: The sales figures stated above are my personal sales figures. Please understand my results are not typical, I’m not implying you’ll duplicate them (or do anything for that matter). I have the benefit of practicing direct response marketing and advertising for 10 years, and have an established following as a result. The average person who buys any “how to” information gets little to no results. I’m using these references for example purposes only. Your results will vary and depend on many factors …including but not limited to your background, experience, and work ethic. All business entails risk as well as massive and consistent effort and action. If you're not willing to accept that, please DO NOT GET THIS BOOK.
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